1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates generally to networked computer systems. More particularly, the present application relates to software and systems management in networked computer environments.
2. Description of the Related Art
Enterprises are increasingly moving towards a grid based computing environment as they strive to contain information technology costs and streamline their businesses through outsourcing of non-core business processes and sharing of distributed resources. The grid infrastructure is emerging to be a common platform for realizing such changes. The grid infrastructure provides middleware services for discovery, naming, messaging, monitoring, and resource brokering.
While grid-based systems can facilitate resource sharing across multiple administrative domains, grid-based systems are much harder to manage from a system administration point of view. One reason for this is that the current state-of-the-art in system management technology has not kept pace with the advances in middleware. Most of the progress has been in managing single or cluster-based systems. Even for such systems, system administrators face a much higher level of complexity when they have to configure and deploy a new service on an existing infrastructure or manage the lifecycle of the existing service and software stack. The situation is much worse in a complex application environment, for example, an environment involving orchestration of a workflow formed by multiple business processes. In such cases, deployment and life cycle management solutions need to take an integrated view of the multiple tiers involved and current system management technologies do not provide the necessary means to build such solutions.
In a federated environment, component services and resources belonging to multiple administrative domains cooperate and coordinate their activities so as to deliver a composite higher level service without violating policies corresponding to individual administrative domains. These federated systems are sometimes referred to as virtual organizations, collective services, on demand clusters, agreement based cooperating systems, and so on. A key characteristic of such systems is that individual components are not dedicated to provide their services to the organization for its entire lifetime, but their commitment to provide the service is limited to a well-defined period of time. Components are constituent elements that form the organizational grid. For example, a component could be a physical box (hardware), an application server instance (software), or a firewall (network).
Often times, the individual components have the liberty to leave the virtual organization with or without prior notice. As a result, the composite federated system must always be prepared to deal with the changes in the service levels offered by individual components as well as asynchronous availability and unavailability of the component services. Traditional system management controls that are designed for dedicated and static cluster-based systems are not geared towards handling such dynamic and continuously evolving systems.
The ability to configure and manage large installations of systems has been an active area of research within the information technology community. The Local Configuration (LCFG) system is a script based system that dynamically configures machines based upon configuration information stored in a central database (Anderson, P., “Towards a High-Level Machine Configuration System,” LISA, 1994). The information pertains to network, system, and services that need to be configured on the system. Smart Framework for Object Groups (SmartFrog) is a system for specifying the configuration, and deployment of distributed applications (Goldsack, P, Guijarro, J, Mecheneau, G, Murray, P, Toft, P, “SmartFrog: Configuration and Automatic Ignition of Distributed Applications,” HP OVUA 2003). SmartFrog provides a language to specify the configuration of applications and dependencies between them. SmartFrog provides an infrastructure for processing and deploying applications on the distributed systems. The GridWeaver project is exploring the notion of combining LCFG and SmartFrog technologies for configuration management of large systems. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) effort is looking at managing distributed resources using Web services. The Grid Forum is attempting to standardize the specification language as part of the Configuration Description, Deployment, and Lifecycle Management (CDDLM) activity.
Some technologies provide means to monitor individual J2EE components that are participating in providing a service. The technology helps system administrators to monitor performance, identify failures, and check performance bottlenecks.